Oleg Prokofiev

Oleg Prokofiev is a significant and undiscovered poet who deserves more exposure.

His extant poetic output, some hundreds of poems, all in Russian, was left with his family at his death in 1998. One might consider that his lack of visibility as a poet might be due either to his being overshadowed by his famous father, or to critical suspicion that a person better known as a painter and sculptor cannot be expected to excel also as a poet.

 

In fact the source of both these prejudices can be found in Prokofiev’s own psyche and after his settlement in Britain in 1971 Prokofiev never made any attempt to make himself visible on the British poetry scene. He continued to write exclusively in Russian and only one collection of his poems in English translation was ever published (The Scent of Absence 1995, Keele University Publications, various translators. ISBN 09509080.)

 

In style his poetry is imagistic and fragmentary: difficult to translate. He uses no punctuation and relies on the line break to unravel his often ambiguous syntax. An English equivalent can appear satisfactory as it develops on the page but doing justice to the often elusive meaning is quite difficult. Prokofiev’s poetry often reaches to express pre-verbal or supra-verbal perceptions and his imagery is deliberately both open-ended and hermetic.

 

Prokofiev’s poems continued to appear in Russia through samizdat publications and he kept in touch with such poets as Kropivnitski, Sapgir 

and Gennady Aygi with whom he shares elements of deliberate primitivism and surrealism. There is now renewed interest in 'dissident 'artists as well as with writers previously ignored in the soviet period. Oleg's poems are now being published in a collected edition of over 700 poems published, in russian language by ASP Publishing in America, edited by Ilja Kukuj